Kim Hogan’s art is a frictionless combination of fantasy, nature and modernity. Her exquisite, joyful compositions convey a childlike wonder and sophistication that seduces and inspires viewers of all ages. Throughout her prolific career she has consistently captivated the public with the stunning geometrical and pictorial effects of her work.
Since 1994, her art’s enlivening presence has graced galleries, restaurants and public spaces throughout the Lehigh Valley. Hogan’s marvelous creations have been featured at Crayola Experience, Connexions Gallery, the Easton Home and the Weller Health Education Center.
Students at Saucon Valley, Lincoln and Calypso Elementary schools have had the pleasure of making mosaic murals with this charming artist. Currently her pieces can be seen on North Bank Street, Cherubina Ristorante, the Easton Area Public Library and the Grundy House Museum. If you stop to rest on one of the park benches near Just Born Inc., you are probably sitting on one of Hogan’s collaborative works.
Her family tree is filled with all sorts of artists. By the time she reached the tender age of 10, Hogan knew the art world was calling her, too. Throughout the school years that followed, she excelled, receiving many awards for her exceptional art.
Hogan attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan where she majored in illustration. Although college was stimulating, there was very little encouragement oozing from the educators. The students were told that most of them would end up working in a deli or as a waitress.
While a child may gaze upon these delightful works with wide eyes in awe, an adult will often ponder the sheer magnitude of the undertaking.
“This was actually imprinted on my mind and for many years I was afraid to step out into the art world,” Hogan recalls.
She lived in the shadow of her professors’ words for many seasons. Hogan eventually married and worked as a waitress. It was the birth of her first child that reignited her creative energies. She began making watercolor portraits of her daughter, Devon. Her friend, Marcy Levey, was deeply impressed by the quality of these creations. She arranged for Hogan to have her first show at a local coffee house. She sold many pieces.
“I sold portraits of other people’s children to strangers! It was awesome,” says Hogan, who made a comfortable living for several years painting watercolor portraits of children.
Eventually, her marriage ended and she enrolled in a mosaics class with instructor Donna Thatcher at Clayworks in Easton.
“When I was going through my divorce, it felt great to smash things,” Hogan admits.
In addition to sublimating her anger, she found it liberating to explore the aleatory possibilities engendered by this process. The relentless rigor required to produce high quality representational watercolors was swiftly eclipsed. Hogan was hooked on mosaics.
For her early pieces, she smashed tiles into submission with a hammer and used the fragments to execute her art. However, this violent process created cracks on the surface of the pieces—an effect she felt compromised the purity of her finished work. Hogan abandoned both the limited palette of tiles and her blunt instruments for the gorgeous colors and compelling textures of stained glass and immeasurably more precise breaking tools.
She often dedicates uncounted hours to creating these marvelous mosaics. While a child may gaze upon these delightful works with wide eyes in awe, an adult will often ponder the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. One reconsiders how she choreographs and shapes so many disparate pieces into a breathtaking whole.
“The process is very time-consuming but you get into the moment; you’re in the zone and magic happens,” she says.
Attention to detail propels these pieces far beyond the mundane, incomposite mosaics one sees at many art fairs or galleries. Hogan heightens the viewer’s visual interest by placing three-dimensional shapes near flatter objects. Judicious, winsome embellishments such as handmade clay flowers, river rocks, pottery shards and an antique button for a bear’s eye are all perfectly placed, enlivening the civil surfaces with a contagious playfulness.
Teaching is also a passion of Hogan’s. She has been deeply involved instructing children and adults since 2006.
“I love teaching,” she says, her voice softening. “I love nurturing that creative spirit in others.”
She also leads an inviting class at photographer Bruce Ward’s farm. They cheerfully refer to this as, “an open-air uncorked class,” since wine and cheese are served while working outdoors.
Hogan remarked that students of all ages usually enjoy the process of making a mosaic.
“It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle without any rules,” she intriguingly suggests. Although it is easy to imagine having fun creating a piece, achieving the level of skill, poetry and sophistication in her creations is another thing entirely.
“I love teaching, I love nurturing that creative spirit in others.”
For many years she was also the Banana Works (a prior outreach effort for at-risk kids) project leader for the Banana Factory in Bethlehem.
“I took at-risk teens and gave them job opportunities creating public art. For them, it was a project from inception to completion, then celebration,” she says.
Their visual legacy includes the twinkling mosaic wall downstairs at Easton’s Sigal Museum in 2010, and the large mosaic outside the Boys and Girls Club for the Neston Heights Community Center in 2011. Unfortunately, the Banana Factory is no longer running this program.
In 2009, Hogan was commissioned by Lehigh Valley Hospital to head a very special cancer project. The challenge was to create eight separate panels that would all interconnect. She included pieces in the mosaic created by children affected by rare blood diseases and cancer. On the back of each section made by a child, Hogan had them write a wish.
“To me, it gave it more of a spiritual power,” Hogan says.
One young lady who had a brain tumor wished to meet Orlando Bloom. Her wish was realized when Bloom somehow found out about this extraordinary project and flew the excited fan out to California to have brunch at his home.
Hogan’s growing body of work is a testament to a fertile imagination.
“I lived on fairy tales when I was a girl,” she fondly recalls.
One young lady who had a brain tumor wished to meet Orlando Bloom.
Although she is an intuitive creature who seems to effortlessly make all the right moves while creating a mosaic, Hogan clearly states that she requires structure. For example, she will reference a picture of a pony, illustrate it and then execute the form with stained glass and other carefully considered objects.
Hogan’s art covers a wide range of sizes and she is clearly comfortable working on any scale. The small pieces pack a concise punch while the larger mosaics revel in the rich rewarding complexities generated by a master orchestrating hundreds of privileged pieces into a singular masterpiece.
Juggling many projects concurrently is commonplace for Hogan and she thrives on staying busy. “It is best to be single-minded,” she says. “However, a lot of times I have three or four projects going on at once. I am working on one at the Banana Factory, one at the farm and one at my home. I want to always have something going on.”
Currently she is working on two mosaic panels for St. Luke’s University Hospital in Bethlehem. The works will be showcased in the hospital’s third floor chapel. She is also busy writing and illustrating a children’s book based on a wonderful series of mosaics she is creating about the circus. Based on the pieces she has completed, this should be an exciting visual and literary treat.
Hogan welcomes visitors to her studio on First Fridays at the Banana Factory (Studio 350) at 25 W. Third St., Bethlehem. Visit Hogan online at kimhoganfineart.com.
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